For 10 excruciating minutes, Jamie Rohrs did not know if his girlfriend and their two children were alive or dead.

When they were finally reunited, his next move was crystal clear.

“He just looked at me and he said, ‘I know this is not the time and place, but will you marry me?’ ” his girlfriend, Patricia Legaretta, 25, told CNN.

“And I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

Rohrs, 25, first considered watching the premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises” from the front row of the suburban Aurora, Colo., multiplex, but he changed his mind and settled toward the back with Legaretta, her daughter, Azariah, 4, and the couple’s son, Ethan, 4 months.

Fifteen minutes into the movie, cops say, madman James Eagan Holmes, 24, opened fire from the theater’s front entrance — and Rohrs’ life turned upside down.

He lost track of his infant son in the chaos that erupted but managed to get himself out. And for what seemed like an eternity, he thought his entire family had been murdered by the deranged shooter.

“My son’s still in there,” he told ABC News. “My girlfriend is still in there. I’m out here. Who leaves their child there?”

He said he was worried that if he went back inside and was killed, that his kids could become “orphans with no parents.”

“I’m going to call 911 and trying to call Patricia and it’s just ringing, and every time it rings I’m like, ‘They’re dead, they’re dead, your whole family is dead,’ ” he told CNN.

Inside, Legaretta tried desperately to shield her daughter from the bullets flying everywhere. Then she saw the sliver of an opportunity.

“There was a moment where the shooting stopped and I saw people running, and at that moment I just grabbed the baby and I just grabbed my daughter and got her out as fast as I could,” Legaretta said.

“I was just thinking we’ve just got to get out. I just got to get out the doors and if I just fall dead, just get my kid out of here.”

But Legaretta, who suffered a minor shrapnel injury to her leg, was struggling.

That’s when another survivor, Jarell Brooks, 19, saw the frightened mother and didn’t think twice about what to do next.

“I made sure they got in the aisle and pushed behind her to make sure she got out of there,” the young hero — who was shot in the leg in the process — told ABC News.

Meanwhile Rohrs experienced the longest 10 minutes of his life.

“I couldn’t think,” he said. “I got a phone call from a Colorado number and I answered it and thank God it was Patricia.”

He popped the question once the couple was reunited at the hospital. “I’m ecstatic, extremely excited, but at the same time, you have this tragedy, this sadness hanging over,” Patricia Legaretta told “Good Morning America.”